‘I thought, if Keith Richards can give up drinking, I know I can’
As he nears 70, the legendary musician opens up about his troubled childhood, years of hard partying, and the unlikely icon that set him on the path to recovery
N‘Once I took that first drink... I just looked at the world differently. I didn’t feel the pain’
‘I had all these ground rules. So long as I didn’t have brown liquor, I was not an alcoholic’
ile Rodgers turned 69 last month, and he likes to joke that he doesn’t look a day over 68. He bounds in to the studio, beaming the world’s most brilliant smile, a bundle of infectious enthusiasm ready to take on the day. He apologises for being all of two minutes late, explaining that a song came to him just as he was leaving the house. It was for Idina Menzel, star of Frozen, and he had to go back and sing it into his voice recorder, before it disappeared again, off into the musical ether: “I’m always composing. I have this continuous stream of free floating ideas all the time, and it’s hard to turn off.”
From the moment he arrives, he is in full flow, as irresistibly compelling as the music he makes. “I cannot believe it, I’m almost 70 years old!” he beams. “This is ridiculous, but I feel great!”
And yet he is keen to point out that, despite his age, he still sleeps with the light on. He thinks it stretches back to his childhood, when, at the age of five, he was sent to a convalescent home for boys to treat his asthma. Every night, he would lie awake, terrified, listening as the caretaker made his way through the dormitory abusing the other boys. He doesn’t think he was ever abused himself, but the memory has stayed with him, so that even last night, he fell asleep with the light on.
“I always had poor eyesight. I couldn’t see,” he explains now. Today, an assistant cleans his trademark glasses for him before we sit down to do the interview, but there is still a bit of that boy in 69-year-old Rodgers.
“I mean, come on, your imagination is just all over the place [when you are a child]. So even though there was nothing in the room, I would believe that there was somebody there or somebody about to come in. If I could see, I felt that at least I had a chance of escaping. It’s a juvenile thing. I’m certainly no longer a child, but that fear is sort of primal at this point.
“I can try and trace back [where it came from]. I believe that it all happened when I was at the convalescent home, because that’s one of my earliest memories. I’ve had this problem ever since.”
But he wants me to know that he sleeps exceptionally well with the light on. “You can see, I’m here and I’m ready to go! I’ve been up since 7am. Four hours sleep last night, but that’s normal for me, and it’s been that way since I was a child.”
I say that four hours doesn’t sound like very much. “How do you think I’ve got all these records done? It’s because I’m writing and I’m composing all night!”
We meet at Abbey Road, where he is producing an album for the band The Zutons. Outside, tourists swarm the studios, scrawling love notes to the Beatles on the walls and recreating the infamous pose from the level crossing.
I tell him that, arguably, he has had more of an influence on modern music than the Fab Four. “Oh, oh, you flatterer, you,” he smiles, touching my arm. But it’s true. In the 1970s, he formed Chic and, to this day, the majestic opening beats of Le Freak are enough to drive people of all ages to the dance floor. With hits like Everybody Dance and I Want Your Love, he pioneered disco, but he was also partly responsible for ushering in a new dawn of hip-hop, after the Sugarhill Gang sampled Good Times on Rapper’s Delight (the bass line also inspired Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust).
He has a signature “chucking” sound that amateur guitarists around the world dream of mastering, while professional artists line up to get their hands on his production skills. He wrote I’m Coming Out for Diana Ross and We Are Family for Sister Sledge. He produced Madonna’s Like a Virgin album, while David Bowie’s biggest-selling record, Let’s Dance, is another that has Rodgers’s hands all over it.
Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, Bryan Ferry, Duran Duran, Eric Clapton… I’m afraid this page does not have a big enough word count for me to be able to list all the people that Nile Rodgers has worked with. His career is hard to wrap your head around, and it shows no signs of stopping, his 2013 collaboration with Daft Punk, Get Lucky, bringing his music to a whole new generation.
But we are not here to talk about his work – we are here to talk about his sobriety. Next week is Addiction Awareness Week, and as part of that, he has agreed to appear on my podcast, Mad World, to talk about his own battles with addiction. He had his last drink and drug on August 15, 1994, after a rather epic bender that took in Madonna’s 36th birthday party, and a lengthy spell in a bathroom, putting the world to rights with Mickey Rourke and a large amount of cocaine.
It’s quite easy to mythologise Rodgers’s drink and drug-taking – long nights in Studio 54, days spent partying with Grace Jones – and he tells me that, for a long time, it was great fun. But it hollowed him out, until he was more about the using than the music, and it took him not just to the brink of death, but actual death, with his heart completely stopping one particularly unmemorable night.
He came round in a hospital, with a doctor by his bed, who had at one point been writing his death certificate.
“I woke up and there’s fluorescent lights over my head. The doctor explained the drama of the whole thing to me, how hard they worked to keep me alive, and how I really needed to change my ways. And because I’m a kind and considerate and compassionate person, I did stop.” He pauses, but ever the musician, he doesn’t miss a beat. “For two weeks.”
It was another eight years, he thinks, before he got sober. “Stopping is easy,” he explains now. “It’s just staying stopped – now that’s hard.”
He was born in 1952 in New York City, his addiction almost a sealed deal from the moment he arrived. His father was rarely present and died of alcoholism when he was a teenager, while his beloved mother, who was just 14 when she gave birth to him, was a heroin addict.
“I was around drugs and addiction my entire life,” he nods. “Some of my earliest memories were hearing the word ‘junkie’, and I didn’t even know what that meant. I thought it was just people who hoarded junk. And it took a while before I learnt that junkies were heroin addicts, and also that a lot of the junkies who were in my life were dying at a higher rate than regular people.”
But he loved his mother and stepfather, and still does, even if they are long gone. They were addicts, yes, but they were also bohemian intellectuals who introduced him to art and jazz. “At the time, if you were a heroin addict then you sort of became a heroin dealer. And I was so fortunate to be around these exciting personalities. I would come home and find movie stars at our house.
“A lot of people don’t believe this, but when I was six, the first book I read was Treasure Island. The second book I read was Moby-dick. So there were a gazillion polysyllabic words that I didn’t understand, and certainly couldn’t pronounce, but I got the gist of it. So, you know, it was colourful.” But it was also painful. “I was a lonely, sad child. If it weren’t for the fact that adults liked me, I wouldn’t have really had any friends because my family were nomadic. They were addicts. They had a problem with money, so we moved around from place to place.”
He always felt like an outsider. “I was always the new kid in class, the new kid in the neighbourhood. And when we moved to the West Coast, to be with my grandparents, the kids were really tough. There were gangs. And because of my New York accent, I just stood out like a sore thumb and everybody picked on me.”
He tells me that, every day, “I was aware of the loneliness, I was aware of the fact that I was the odd person out. There’s a really horrible byproduct of racism in America, which is colourism. So in my family, I’m the only one who is chocolate-coloured; everyone else is light-skinned. You know, if President Obama’s mother wasn’t white, he would definitely have never gotten to be president. That is just how it is in America.
“So I was not light enough. And I was really isolated, even though I was around people. But once I took that first drink, it was, ‘Wow, everybody is beautiful! They like me!’ And I just looked at the world differently somehow. I didn’t feel the pain. I didn’t feel the isolation. I became very outgoing, and it was the antithesis of my normal personality, which is to be very, very shy.”
I tell him that surprises me. “Well, the reason I’m so outgoing now is because I learnt how to be that way.” H e remembers the first time he did drugs and drank alcohol. He was 11. He had one friend who was “sort of my protector, and we were drinking and sniffing glue. I passed out. When he revived me, I went ‘Wow… let’s do that again!’” He shakes his head in retrospective horror. “I should have known right then that I was genetically programmed to become an addict.”
As his career soared in the 1970s, so did his ability to get his hands on cocaine and alcohol. He remembers driving home after a night out with Robert Downey Jr, and being stopped by the police. “My music was so popular at the time that I never got arrested,” he says. “The cop who stopped me took a picture of me, he took a Polaroid, and he showed me my cocaine-encrusted nostrils. He said: ‘You need to keep this and take a look at yourself.’
“But I didn’t know that I was an addict,” he says now, almost amazed by his naivety. “As a matter of fact, once I realised that my parents were addicts, I sort of promised myself that I wouldn’t become one. And I had all the ground rules.” Such as? “So long as I didn’t drink brown liquor, I was not an alcoholic.” Fast-forward to 1994, and he is in a hotel, after his night with Mickey Rourke, drinking straight scotch, having exhausted all the other options in the minibar. “And I went: ‘Wow… this is amazing! All these years, I could have been drinking this!’
“That particular night made me realise that I had not only broken my own rules, but I was also bordering on…” he pauses for a moment. “I don’t like to use the word ‘crazy’, but I had two realities. I had the reality of when I was high and drunk, and then I had the reality after the cobwebs cleared, and I would go: ‘Really? I did that?’”
It was a combination of things that led him to rehab – the brown liquor, a bout of cocaine psychosis, and a video someone had taken of him playing, in which he was not quite as good as he thought he had been at the time. “It’s alignment. I can’t explain any of this stuff effectively, but somehow I happened to fall in the right spot.”
On the flight to rehab, he read in a magazine that Keith Richards had got sober. “I was like, ‘Wow… I know Keith. We’ve hung. I used to think he was a super-alcoholic compared to me. And I thought, man, if this guy can give it up, I know I can give it up!’
“I read this article and I was so moved, because he said as much as he loved heroin, he knew that it was impinging upon his ability to create music, and he had to choose between these two great loves. And that was what had happened to me that night.”
Eight months later, he left rehab, and one of the first people to call him was Keith Richards, looking for drugs. “I was like: ‘Dude! I got sober, and I was inspired by you!’”
He wasn’t tempted, and he feels incredibly grateful that he has managed to stick with sobriety. It gave him a new life, and enabled him to get through a cancer diagnosis 10 years ago. He should be dead, and he can’t believe his luck, to be here, in Abbey Road, working with young musicians, still shaping the musical landscape. He never had kids, but he lives happily with his long-term partner, Nancy Hunt, between the States and London.
The best way he can explain it is that he has always been in the right place, at the right time. Sobriety, and his life generally, “is a miracle to me, an alignment of incidents.” It’s the same as his career. “You don’t get hit records because a song’s great. Hell, a lot of my songs are great, but they don’t become hit records. You get a hit record because of this alignment that happens outside of you. It’s because the promotion team works, it’s because the people at the radio station like it, and all of a sudden the whole world is listening to Get Lucky, or We Are Family. I’ve got a bunch of [hit records] – but they were all outside of me.”
I tell him that Get Lucky was the first song I was able to dance to after I got sober. Behind his glasses, I see his eyes well up, and mine might be filling, too. “You know,” he says, bringing me into a hug, “I feel like the luckiest person in the world. Because I get to do this. And not only do I get paid well, but I get paid well in emotion. And it’s amazing, because the emotions that I feel now are real to me.
“So even though, yes, I still sleep with the lights on, at least I take my glasses off. The images are a little fuzzy, but I do believe I’m looking at the real world now.”